McCain pollster: Wright wouldn't have worked

By Ben Smith

12/11/08 06:57 PM EST

John McCain's top pollster, Bill McInturff, said this evening that attacking Barack Obama over his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not have helped McCain's campaign and could have destroyed his presidency, had he been elected.

Some Republicans were angry during the campaign that McCain had -- reportedly for reasons of principle, and out of concern that he'd be viewed as racist -- refused to air ads with Wright's inflammatory sermons, and believed they were fair game and a silver bullet against Obama. An outside group did air one such ad in the closing days of the race.

"I said 'Look, if f we do win we’ll win with about 273 electoral votes and we’ll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'" recalled McInturff of the internal discussions about cutting attack ads with Wright. "If [McCain] had used that issue that way, you’d already be delegitimized as a president. You couldn’t function as government."

McInturff also said that McCain's burden in the final days was to close the gap with young voters and Latino voters.

"John [barred Wright attacks] for instinctively all the right reasons," McInturff said. But "anybody who believed that his issue would have affected the groups we were losing by those margins had never talked to anybody in any of those subgroups about how they felt about those issues."

McInturff also praised campaign manger Rick Davis for resisting the "enormous pressure" from the Republican Party to attack on the Wright issue.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe concurred that, by the fall, Wright was not the toxic issue some thought.

"Voters had digested Reverend Wright, and it gave some of them indigestion -- I don’t want to minimize it," Plouffe said. "People had seen the tapes, they had talked about it a lot," he said, dismissing the notion that it could have changed the game in the final days.

Plouffe did concede an early failure to understand the power of Wright's sermons.

"We failed as a campaign to do the proper research there," he said. "We hadn’t done as thorough research, looked through every tape of every sermon," he said, saying the "ferocity" of the tapes' appearance on the scene "took us by surprise."

"It was a moment of great peril," Plouffe said of the day the story broke in the spring.

Chief strategist David Axelrod chimed in with a story about receiving the text of Obama's speech on his Blackberry early in the morning he would deliver it.

"I spooled through the speech and I got to the end of it and I emailed him back and said, 'This is why you should be president.'"